In the quality assurance field, the main goal is to ensure the quality and reliability of the product. Manual testing is the most common way of testing and it consumes a lot of time. However, there are techniques to shorten time needed for manual testing by automating time-consuming tasks.
Selenium IDE
There are many different ways to automate tasks and Selenium IDE is just one of them. Selenium IDE has been around now for some time. It’s a small add-on for firefox which allows you to run and record tests for your web application. The reason I use Selenium IDE is because you can use it without almost any interference in your process of manual testing. Selenium IDE is lightweight and very easy to use and it’s constantly improved.
When I do manual testing, I cover the areas that I wante to test, and as I go, I turn on Selenium IDE and record tasks. I try to record scenarios that I will use later in other tests. These small Selenium IDE test cases are recorded so I will not waste time on common tasks, which would be repeated numerous times. Automating small tasks can speed up testing tremendously. This way you would spend time on reviewing parts of the application which are important, rather than spending time on common, everyday tasks.
Here is a simple scenario of my usual review of new functionality on our Newsberry project: Recently we released monthly plans, which required a lot of sign up testing. During testing of the sign up process, I recorded some scripts in Selenium IDE (simple html scripts), for signing up users, adding senders and activating them. This is the usual process you would use when you are creating a new account. Now, these scripts were used a lot during the review of monthly plans, but they were used a lot later during other reviews too. By recording small tasks, you can simply re-run them later, and not worry about doing the same process manually over and over again.
The beauty of the process is that it takes only couple of minutes to do this. These are not complicated test cases, test suites, no, these are very simple scripts, which everyone can run. You can simply send them over to developers, designers, and they can use it the same way you did, as long as they have firefox installed on their computers.